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Career Handbook
The Fate Of Elon Musk’s Assistant Is A Cautionary Tale For Negotiating Salary
Negotiating is risky — but so is not negotiating
When’s the best time to negotiate a raise? It depends on who your boss is.
I had never written or reported anything about Elon Musk. Between Tesla’s bitcoin bet, feeding the GameStop frenzy, and temporarily dethroning Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest human, it seems like he gets covered enough already. (2023 update: still accurate, I’d say.)
Then, in early 2021, I was assigned an article for Entrepreneur magazine covering how much money billionaires made in their sleep. Thanks to Tesla’s wild stock growth in 2020, Musk was at the top of that list, generating an eye-popping $88.3 million USD every night — dreamland, indeed. As I combed through mountains of Musk articles for research, a quiet-yet-compelling story caught my eye. It’s one that serves as an important cautionary tale when negotiating your salary.
Negotiation is the ultimate productivity hack. Stanford MBA professor Margaret A. Neale notes that, in a hypothetical situation in which you and a coworker both start at a $100K salary — but your coworker negotiates a 7% bump early on — you’ll have to work an extra eight years over the life of your career to catch up to them. Negotiation isn’t just about money; it’s about having more life and freedom.
That being said, things can quickly go sideways. If you’ve considered initiating a conversation about a raise in the future, you’ll want to keep this following story in mind.
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Elon’s Test
Mary Beth Brown was Musk’s longtime assistant, being at his side day in and day out for 12 years. If you’ve ever watched a high-powered CEO, you know that executive assistants (EAs) practically hand their lives over for these kinds of jobs, as they require extensive travel and service. Top EAs are coveted hires.
According to Ashlee Vance’s biography on Elon Musk, Brown was even more than that. She sometimes made business decisions…
